The best English-Hungarian online dictionaries

What makes a good Hungarian-English Dictionary?

All language learners need a good dictionary every now and then. But wait a second: how do we define the term “good dictionary”? How good is an English-Hungarian dictionary supposed to be? How can you differentiate between real gold and “fool’s gold”?

First of all, a good dictionary is easy to use. You can find the words, expressions that you are looking for quickly, and you can easily distinguish among several words meaning the same thing. You can do this because the dictionary offers the Hungarian words according to the frequency of usage, from most common to least common. This makes possible for the language learners to choose the most popular form of the word without anybody helping them.

Secondly, a good dictionary has lots of examples of Hungarian word-usage, and a large vocabulary. If you don’t get to feel the meaning of the new word at once, looking at these examples are a good way to clarify it.

Thirdly, it helps the language-learner with the right pronunciation of new words. It can help you by offering a phonetic transcription of each word using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), or giving you an audio pronunciation of the Hungarian word. The best dictionaries offer you both.

Now, let’s have a look at the Hungarian-English dictionaries available at the moment:

A new arrival on palette of Hungarian-English dictionaries, it has just appeared.

+ Blab-la is a name worth being remembered when speaking about language-learning products. Dictionaries by Blab.la are usually good quality.

+ Just like Sztaki, it also uses a community made of language-learners and native speakers to improve the dictionary entries. You can register and become part of this community.

– It also uses text-to-speech, but it is one of the best. You can use it for learning pronunciation.

+ It gives several meanings of an English word in Hungarian. Beside the Hungarian meaning it is always given, what part of speech that is. It also has example sentences, with audio pronunciation.

To sum it up, there isn’t such thing as a perfect, free, online English-Hungarian dictionary. However there are dictionaries that are near perfect.

If you are learning Hungarian, I recommend using theSztaki English-Hungarian dictionary, and the Blab.la dictionary. Both dictionaries cover wide Hungarian vocabulary, come with sample sentences, audio pronunciations, and related words. They both are under constant revision by a linguist community.

If you would like to hear a Hungarian word pronounced by native audio speakers, I recommend using Forvo. Just type any Hungarian word into the search bar, and listen to various pronunciations uploaded by native speakers.

Did you find this post interesting? Please share it with your friends, so that they could make use of it, too! You can do it below: